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Clement Attlee
Union of Britain |party= Federationists |events= |status= Alive }}Clement Richard Attlee is a syndicalist politician of the Union of Britain, being a member of the Federationists party. History Early life Attlee was born in London into a middle class family, the seventh of eight children. He was educated at Northaw School, a boys' preparatory school near Pluckley in Kent, Haileybury College, and University College, Oxford, where in 1904 he graduated BA with second-class honours in Modern History. He worked for a time at his father's law firm Druces and Attlee but did not enjoy the work, and had no particular ambition to succeed in the legal profession. In 1906, he became a volunteer at Haileybury House, a charitable club for working-class boys in Stepney in the East End of London run by his old school, and from 1907 to 1909 he served as the club's manager. Until then, his political views had been more conservative. However, after his shock at the poverty and deprivation he saw while working with the slum children, he came to the view that private charity would never be sufficient to alleviate poverty and that only direct action and income redistribution by the state would have any serious effect. This sparked a process that caused him to convert to socialism. He subsequently joined the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in 1908 and became active in local politics. In 1909, he stood unsuccessfully at his first election, as an ILP candidate for Stepney Borough Council. In 1911, he was employed by the UK Government as an "official explainer"—touring the country to explain Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George's National Insurance Act. He spent the summer of that year touring Essex and Somerset on a bicycle, explaining the Act at public meetings. A year later, he became a lecturer at the London School of Economics. The Weltkrieg Following the outbreak of the Weltkrieg, Attlee applied to join the British Army. Initially his application was turned down, as at age 31 he was seen as too old; however, he was finally allowed to join in September, and was commissioned in the rank of Captain with the 6th Battalion, South Lancashire Regiment, part of the 38th Brigade of the 13th Division, and was sent to fight in the Gallipoli Campaign. After a period fighting in Gallipoli, he collapsed after falling ill with dysentery and was put on a ship bound for England to recover. When he woke up he wanted to get back to action as soon as possible, and asked to be let off the ship in Malta (now owned by Germany) where he stayed in hospital to recover. His hospitalisation coincided with the Battle of Sari Bair, which saw a large number of his comrades killed. Upon returning to action, he was informed that his company had been chosen to hold the final lines during the evacuation of Suvla. As such, he was the penultimate man to be evacuated from Suvla Bay. The Gallipoli Campaign had been engineered by the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. Although the campaign gave Attlee an admiration for Churchill as a military strategist, he saw the failures of Churchill as failures of conservative politics in general, causing a deep rift between the two even before the revolution. Attlee later served in the Mesopotamian Campaign in the Ottoman Empire he was badly wounded, being hit in the leg by shrapnel while storming an enemy trench during the Battle of Hanna. He was sent firstly to India, and then back to the UK to recover. He would spend most of 1917 training soldiers at various locations in England. From 2–9 July 1917, he was the temporary commanding officer of the newly formed L Battalion, the Tank Corps at Bovington Camp, Dorset. After fully recovering from his injuries, he was sent to France in 1919 to serve on the Western Front for the final months of the war. After being discharged from the Army in December 1921, he went back to Stepney, and returned to his old job lecturing part-time at the London School of Economics for a while, though this job wouldn't last long as Attlee soon joined the Labour Party's left-wing. At the 1922 general election, Attlee became the Member of Parliament for the constituency of Limehouse in Stepney. The British Revolution Attlee initially opposed the 1925 General Strike, believing that strike action should not be used as a political weapon. However, when it happened, he did not attempt to undermine it. At the time of the strike, he was chairman of the Stepney Borough Electricity Committee. He negotiated a deal with the Electrical Trade Union so that they would continue to supply power to hospitals, but would end supplies to factories. Once the Labour Party's left-wing finally spoke out in favour of the strike (now turned revolution) on 18 March, Attlee's opposition finally ended. After parliament evacuated to Canada, he became one of the few remaining radicals of the Labour party left, helping to pass the unprecedented act that would abolish both houses of Parliament and the United Kingdom itself, officially proclaiming the Union of Britain on 3 June 1925. This new government was based around the long standing Trade Unions Congress (TUC) which had helped coordinate the actions of the General Strike. Personal life He has a brother who became a clergyman and a sister who became a missionary, and although both fled to Canada to escape religious persecution, Attlee himself remains fervently against religion, saying that he doesn't believe in "the mumbo-jumbo." Category:People Category:Europeans Category:British-related topics